Six

I’ve been a mother for six years, now. It wasn’t always certain that I would make such a milestone. At first, it wasn’t certain that I would live to childbearing age, then it wasn’t certain that I could and/or should have children. I jumped those hurdles. I actually practically flew over them.  I went into remission in 1992, and I have been there ever since. Rather than being one of the women whose Lupus flares when she gets pregnant, my numbers improve, if anything, when I am expecting.

Of course in between going into remission and becoming pregnant the first time, a lot of things happened. I graduated three times, met my husband, married my husband, and bought our first house together. Life was good, so we decided to make it better by adding to our little family.

I cannot describe how much more intense everything has become since having a child, especially this child. He is a joy and a wonder. He is one of the most empathetic people I know. He has a heart as big as the world, and has a capacity for forgiveness that is both amazing and awe-inspiring. He is also whip-smart and extremely curious, which is an alternately wonderful and terrifying combination. I fear things it never occurred to me to fear before becoming a parent. Arrows and slings aimed at him cut me deeply, and I hope my wounds save him some pain. I do know that I cannot and should not shield any of my children from all hurts, but there is a very unreasonable, instinctual part of me that would like to do just that.

His birth story is not the typical one. He was transverse and born via c-section. He was whisked away to the NICU for CPAP and a blood transfusion as he had aspirated meconium and was acutely anemic before I could do more than give him a quick hug, and I wasn’t allowed to hold him for over a day and a half. I know many mothers have it much worse, but it was not an easy time. My sweet boy pulled through and thrived. I used to joke that he was such a snuggler because he was trying to make up for that first 36 hours or so. Since both of his siblings are cuddlebugs, I suspect that our kids just are that way.

Now he is six. He talks at the speed of lightning, and often at the volume of a stage performer. He will be in an elementary uniform in the fall. He is tallish and wiry w/ a mop of light brown curly/wavy hair. He aspires to be pretty much everything when he grows up. He used to want to be an emperor, but now he has set his sights on paleontologist, detective, author/illustrator, rock star, and father. I have watched him grow from that teeny baby hooked up to too many machines to a six-year-old who can most often be seen w/ a book in one hand and an apple in the other, and every cliché about it going too fast is absolutely right. He can’t be six, but I am so glad he is.

Speaking of Free Speech

“I have a right to my opinion!”

“Excuse me, I thought this was a free country!”

“What about freedom of speech?”

You may have heard or seen these arguments or some variation on them when you have witnessed or been a part of a disagreement. I feel that it is especially prevalent online, so let me explain a few things. Outside of libel if you’re writing, slander if you’re speaking, revealing classified info if you have access to it, threatening someone’s life, screaming “Bomb!” in an airport, and a few other special cases, you do indeed have the right to say and/or write whatever you desire without intervention from the government. That last bit is key. Freedom of speech and expression is not, nor should it be, freedom from others expressing their disagreement with you. It is also not Freedom from Facts. You can believe the earth is flat. You can spout off about it, quote the “scientist” who wrote a book about it, and post links from the Flat Earth Society, but you will still be wrong, and people will tell you that you are. They are not infringing on your right to free speech by exercising their own.

 Like many rights, it comes with consequences. If you are posting on Facebook, for instance, you need to abide by their terms of service, or your content can be removed. In extreme cases, your account can be terminated. This bit of information happens to be true all over the internet, and is also likely true of your contract with your ISP. You can say what you like, but if you don’t abide by the rules, which you have agreed to follow, you can lose your services. The government isn’t shutting down your Facebook account because you posted your Hustler spread. Facebook is because you violated their TOS. Whether one agrees with the restrictions and enforcements of the terms of service of various websites and ISPs is a different topic.  In addition, some people’s opinions of you may change after you explain why you believe the earth is flat. As a matter of fact, some people may not even like you anymore. It is not an infringement on your rights, but it is a consequence of your actions. To put it another way, you can smoke, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t get cancer.

Also, to paraphrase pretty much every speech from the Voice of Reason to a Superhero, with great power comes great responsibility. The freedom to say and believe what you want is power. It is one that much of the rest of the world doesn’t have. Don’t believe me? Ask a Syrian. When you are not responsible with that power, you can do terrible, hurtful things. At best, when you just say things to say them, without expressing your thoughts civilly, with no desire to check for inaccuracies or logical fallacies, and without making sure that you are not needlessly hurting someone (sometimes the truth hurts, but it is necessary to tell it for the Greater Good, in keeping with the Superhero theme of this paragraph), you look like an idiot. At worst, you become a Supervillain of the information age, spreading lies and inaccurate information, engaging in ad hominem attacks, treating the slippery slope argument as if it were a god, rather than a smokescreen, and just generally contributing to the serious lack of civil discourse we are experiencing in this country. When someone finally stands up, takes off his or her glasses, puts on the spandex, very politely but pointedly makes known all the inaccuracies, and states the truth, the Supervillain retreats behind free speech, attempting to hide behind the mantle he or she has just sullied. In the end, the Supervillain is a coward who yells, “I thought this was a free country!” rather than actually respond to anything that could challenge him or her. Those lines should be reserved for times when there is an actual abuse of power, like the infamous pepper spraying of the college students. They are not to be used when someone merely disagrees with you.

All that being said, I love comments, and I do hope people will comment on my blog when they feel compelled to do so; however, if I feel that what is being said is not respectful to me, other commenters, or anyone else, I reserve the right to delete your comments. Those are MY terms of service, in addition to the Blogger TOS. If you possess it, you can take your vitriol someplace else.

Of Nail Polish, Kilts, and Glitter Shoes

You may have heard a very girly squee of delight this afternoon. My toddler allowed me to paint her toenails and then indicated that she would like her fingernails painted (I use child-safe, non-toxic nail polish). She then wanted to paint my nails. We did my toes, but as I have an injured finger, we stopped there. She is 16 months old. I know she has seen me paint my toenails on occasion, but never my fingernails. I just don’t do it, except for special occasions, because it lasts approximately .07 seconds. I have no idea where she came up with the idea to want her fingernails painted. She may have realized that I had just trimmed both her finger and toenails, so decided they should both be polished as well. Who knows? Now, I may have painted her toenails, never her fingernails, once or twice last summer for my own amusement *whistles innocently,* but she hasn’t seen the stuff since last June or July. Regardless, she wanted it, and I was VERY excited b/c this was a first for me.  My boys have witnessed me applying polish to my toenails before, and while they were interested in the process, they were never interested in having any on them. I know. I offered. There will be no J Crew catalog kerfuffle for me and my boys, at least not when it comes to nail polish. Anyhow, I was excited to have a child who WANTED nail polish. Squee!! Don’t take my feminist card just yet, though.

Gender identity vs biological sex and how they do and don’t intersect is one of my favorite topics. I’ll probably return to it many times as I write.  I have two sons and a daughter. My daughter is the youngest, and we didn’t know she was a girl until she entered the world. Well, my oldest son did, but that is a story for another day. Nearly as soon as people heard she was a girl, they began asking me if I noticed any differences between her and the boys. I have to say that other than the obvious biological/physical differences that there were no real differences at that age. Her voice was a little squeakier than either of her brothers’ voices had been, but they all sounded like newborns and infants when they were newborns and infants.  Even now, there are very few differences that I would say have to do with her being a girl, although there are some. How many of them are societal cues on which she has already picked up and how many are innate? If I could answer that question, I would be published the world over.

I have to admit to having been slightly annoyed when people would ask if my infant daughter was so very different from her brothers simply because she was a girl. When I had my second son, people didn’t ask me how different he was from his older brother, and, believe me, they are two very distinct little people. Why would any differences have to be attributed to her sex? She is her own little person, and while she is a little girl, she is also the baby of the family with two older siblings who dote on her. I would say her birth order may affect her personality as much as anything else. 

My oldest son wants a kilt because “That’s a skirt that men can wear,” he LOVES picking out dresses for me to wear, and he is obsessed w/ heroes of myth, legend, and pop culture. My younger son wears sparkly shoes because, hello, they are sparkly, and he prefers that his hair be as short as possible. My daughter plays with cars and dolls. She loves shoes. She really, really loves shoes. She will hug them and carry them around. She also likes to wear her brothers’ neckties.  All of these things are outward signifiers of gender in our society, but not one of them actually tells you whether they are comfortable in their own skin.

Without writing a long, gushy post about my children, I can tell you that they certainly seem to be very happy with themselves. That comfort to wear what they want, like what they want, and NOT have those things define who and what they are is something that my husband and I try very hard to provide for our children, so I think I can squee when my daughter likes nail polish, just like I gush when my younger son wears his sparkly shoes, or smile when my oldest son tries to talk me into wearing a ridiculously formal and dressy outfit for running errands. I also enjoy when my children all rough-house together, my youngest plays with trucks, my oldest runs around digging up things and slaying dragons, and my middle guy pulls out his trains. I try not to worry about their gender; I worry about their ability to be themselves.

Lies And Damages

I’ve been thinking a lot about the damage a lie can do these days. One or two well-placed untruths or half-truths can have devastating and far-reaching effects.

I have had a few times in my life when the lies being told about me and/or someone I love have reached devastating proportions. One such incident occurred when I was about nine and struggling with an autoimmune disorder. I was diagnosed with Lupus about a year or two after the incident I am about to describe, but at the time we didn’t know what, exactly, was wrong with me. I had been sick and getting sicker for years, and it had been narrowed down to an autoimmune disorder of some sort. Does anyone remember which autoimmune disease was in the news in the late 80s? Somehow, in the game of telephone that occurs when people don’t really know what they’re talking about, but are talking anyway, someone said I had AIDS. It spread like wildfire. Despite the fact that we knew that I did not in fact have that particular immune deficiency, very few people bothered to ask me or my parents what the truth of the matter actually was and/or just refuse to engage in the gossip. These few people ended up forming the core of our support network.

Parents stopped allowing their children to play with me, and some children said rude and frightening things to me, including that I was going to die, and when I died I would go to Hell because I must be gay as only gay people get AIDS. There are so many problems with that statement that I would have to start at least one more post just to unpack them all. Now, even if I HAD actually had AIDS, or more accurately HIV, this would not have been the correct response. We were a little too young for the drugs and sex scene, and I wasn’t going to give any blood transfusions to anyone on the playground. The other children were not in any danger from me, regardless of which autoimmune disorder I had. 

The others were actually much more of a danger to me than I was to them. Every little cold was a problem that could spin off into an eventual hospital stay for me. Every snub and cruel word made what was already an extremely difficult situation worse. Now, I can understand fear for your child and yourself. I can understand fear of the unknown. What I cannot understand is the cruelty that was allowed and, in some cases encouraged. I also fail to fathom the initial decision on the part of the person who started and decided to repeat the lie. Did s/he really believe that I had HIV, and that my parents just weren’t disclosing it? Did s/he just hear autoimmune and jump straight to AIDS? Was there some other reason? Also, even at nine, I knew that you couldn’t get AIDS from playing with people. Why did so many adults react with fear, anger, ignorance, and, even hatred?

What I didn’t understand at nine was why my parents seemed to be much more upset than I was, and I was pretty upset. I thought my mom and dad were going to explode with anger when they heard the gem about me going to Hell. At first, I thought they were angry with me for being sick and making everyone talk about us. When I realized they were not actually angry with me, I did not understand why they were so mad.   They didn’t stay that angry for that long after my sister was mean to me or vice versa. There were people my mother could barely tolerate years later because of this fiasco.

As I grew up, I would understand on an intellectual level why it bothered my parents so much. Since becoming a parent, I also understand on a visceral level. I am now comprehending how hard it must have been for them to just give the facts when the opportunity arose, and not lash back, with things that were true, but would not help, things that would wound the people who had been attacking their child, but would serve no purpose other than to inflict pain for pain. They were also bound by wanting to make things as easy for me as possible and by the need to allow me some privacy and dignity. I now have a very clear and poignant understanding of this motive as well.

Sometimes, when someone is spreading rumors about you, you can simply put your whole truth out there, and others, it isn’t as simple. Other times, you are bound by forces of whatever nature from disclosing everything you would like or would need to disclose in order to clear your name. I suppose, though, that that doesn’t matter. Once a lie is out there, spreading like a cancer, there will be people who believe it no matter what. You can offer hard evidence that it is untrue, and they will not budge. Some people blow with the winds of change and popularity. One day it is the thing to believe that Beyonce is not really pregnant, the next you remember her bikini picture, and then she has her baby and appears in public with a very real post-baby body. Now, most people believe she was pregnant, but even still, rumors persist that it was an elaborate hoax all because her dress folded oddly during an interview. 

I have tried to avoid “blind item” gossip about celebrities because I’ve been thinking about the damage a well-placed lie can do to someone for a long time. Blind items are even more cowardly than regular gossip, and they can hurt people who are not even involved because they won’t name names. They just drop hints. They are also almost always salacious. I would love to say that I have never been a spreader or a believer of harmful gossip about people I do or don’t know. I don’t think I can, though. I doubt anyone can. It is human nature to want to know what is happening, and it is also human nature to want to choose a side. It is much easier to see a wrong and a right, to have a villain and a hero. Certainly, our current political climate reflects this attitude. It is much harder to know and accept that not everything is clear-cut, and that you may not ever have all the facts. One thing to keep in mind is that not possessing all the facts does not give you the right to your own set of facts. Filling in your own blanks is dangerous and hurtful, especially once you fill in your own blanks and repeat that as the truth. That method may be how I ended up having AIDS, although I'll never know for sure. 

Sometimes there is a very clear right and wrong. The drunk driver who drove the wrong way down the highway and hurt and/or killed people is very clearly wrong. Those cases are easy. When two of your friends fight about something, it often isn’t so easy. The older I get, the more I realize that unless I know everything about a situation or someone is clearly in the wrong, that there may not be a side to take. I cannot assume everything from hearing just one side, and I cannot assume that someone who is clearly angry or hurting may not be embellishing and omitting facts. Sometimes things are just sad and hard, and I have to be there for everyone. It makes life easier and harder all at the same time.

One of the things I’ve come to know, is that while the lies about me are obviously damaging to me, the things I say without first checking my facts are also damaging to me. Not only can they damage my credibility if they turn out to be untrue, but they hurt me by causing me to dwell in the muck and the mire. They hurt me by making me a hurtful person. I have never in my life wanted anything so much as to be a good person. I cannot bear the idea of hurting someone with something that while I may have believed it to be true, was not, in fact, true. The many unjust and unfair things in this world upset me, and I do not want to contribute to them. I am not sure who first said this, but I was reminded of this quotation while listening to a scientist speak about climate change on Science Friday, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” 

I don’t know about you, but I would like to be finished damaging others, and lies damage, sometimes forever.   

What’s this all about? Why now?

I realize that this should have been my first post, but the NPR post was just good fun, and felt like a good way for me to jump into blogging. For anyone reading this blog who wonders what I will be writing about, the short answer is: Whatever strikes my fancy.  The longer answer is that it will be about the things that are important to me. It won’t all be funny, and it won’t all be serious. I may post some recipes, although they are likely to be of the “a pinch of this and a dash of that” variety as I don’t really measure things in my daily cooking. I may post the occasional crafty thing. I will definitely post about politics. I am a very liberal Catholic who leads a pretty conservative life. While I am always interested in new/different viewpoints, I am also only interested in respectful discourse.  It will sometimes be about culture- pop, high, and everything in between. It will occasionally be about parenting because that consumes a lot of my life right now. What I really hope it’s about is life and perspective. I work every day to lead a good life, and to try to keep things in perspective, especially when my life is going very well or not so well.

As to the, “why now?” I have been toying with the idea for years, but I could never decide why I should write, and if I did write, what I should say. When I realized that I should just write because I miss it, and then came up with an idea that made me laugh for a first post, I decided now was as good a time as any, and it still took me nearly two months to finally post something. There are a lot of other personal reasons, but this is the succinct, less self-indulgent version.

If you’ve made your way to my little corner of the blogosphere, I hope you enjoy it.  

Just for fun, I made this meme over at quickmeme yesterday.  A couple of weeks ago I went into Target and stuck to my list for literally (yes, I am using the word’s true meaning) the first time ever. No joke. I thought it deserved a small celebration.  http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/36diw6/